Baker v. United States, 115 F.2d 533 (8th Cir. 1940)

The Eighth Circuit's opinion affirming Norman Baker's conviction on all seven counts of an indictment for mail fraud under Section 215 of the federal Criminal Code (18 U.S.C.A. Sec. 338), arising from his advertising of a cancer cure. Case identity confirmed directly against the CourtListener REST API (case name, citation 115 F.2d 533, court Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, docket No. 11683, date filed 1940-11-20, rehearing denied 1940-12-07); a repeat fetch of the same API for a second query returned an identical result, corroborating the record. Direct fetches of the rendered opinion text were blocked at every mirror tried: law.justia.com returned HTTP 403 (both a browser-UA curl request and the WebFetch tool), casetext.com returned HTTP 410 (page gone / paywalled), and courtlistener.com's own rendered opinion page returned HTTP 202 with an empty body (bot-interstitial) to both curl and WebFetch. The REST search API (a JSON endpoint, not the rendered page) did return a live, verified case-identity record each time, and a snippet field independently confirmed the opinion's caption and procedural posture (indictment under Sec. 215/338, seven counts, guilty verdict, judgments and sentences appealed). Because the substantive evidentiary passages (the tea formula given to a Baker Hospital employee, the numbered injection formulas, the pure-hoax characterization, and Baker's boast about profiting from the scheme) could not be confirmed against a directly fetched rendering of the opinion text itself, this case's body prose describes those facts in paraphrase, without verbatim quotation, rather than presenting them as direct quotations from the opinion. Independent secondary sources (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, FSU Special Collections) corroborate the same underlying facts (formula ingredients, the four-year prison sentence) via their own directly-fetched pages, cited separately. Neither of those pages states a specific fine amount, and no fine figure appears anywhere in this bundle as a result: a $4,000 fine is reported by outside sources (e.g. Wikipedia, Casetext's 1944 bail-motion opinion) that were not themselves directly fetched for this case, so it is omitted rather than asserted.